Madeleine Cravens
Pleasure Principle
(Poetry, June, Scribner)
“Pleasure Principle is a series of lyric poems that look at intimate relationships, family history, and urban environments, written from the perspective of a queer woman living in New York.”
I wrote most of the book in Brooklyn. I currently live in Oakland, Calif. I moved back home to New York in late 2019, when I was 23, after several years away. The city went into lockdown a few months later. I became sort of fixated with the strange, horrifying emptiness of public spaces I had known since childhood. Without crowds, the city’s architecture became so clear. So, that was the place I began to write from, in my head, running around Prospect Park, or walking across the Manhattan Bridge, trying to stay sane. I wrote most of this book between 2020 and 2022. But some poems contain phrases I wrote far before that, from journals I kept throughout my teens and earlier 20s. In 2022, I moved to California for the Stegner Fellowship, and Louise Glück helped me radically revise the manuscript: cutting several poems, rearranging order, writing a handful of new pieces. She also encouraged me to go back to everything I’d ever written to see if anything could be useful. I would bring her pages of random lines written over the course of my life. Then she would tell me what she liked and what she didn’t. I had more time between when the collection was acquired and when the final pass was due than I had anticipated. It was almost a year. I feel grateful for that space. I’m not sure if I’ve “broken in” yet: I still feel very much at the beginning of things. If I’ve done anything right, though, it’s been to write constantly while also giving myself permission to be an amateur, to write badly, to need to learn from others. And I read a lot. Professionally, I have regrets about never achieving fluency in another language. I am hugely impressed by translators and envious of their relationship to writing. I think it’s important to learn to really appreciate and seek out criticism, even if this isn’t in your nature. I have a borderline masochistic love of critique, which has helped me. I enjoy it when someone takes apart a poem I’ve written; I think this is a gift. I am tentatively working on a second collection of poems, set in California. The working title is . More largely, I need to find a job and figure out where to live.
